This is an excerpt from an article regarding how to get a charity call centre to stop calling you. Doesn’t help for the scams, but if you are bothered by charities trying to make you feel guilty for not giving them their cut, then you can use this: It helps to ask the charity their Registered name and ABN. “How outsourced fundraising agencies make their money”
• Agencies get paid eight to 17 times the amount of any new donation.
• A charity can claw back some of this money if the donor that the agency
signed up stops giving. How to get charities to stop calling
As is often the case in the consumer marketplace, we’re left to fend for ourselves if
contacts by charities reach the level of harassment. The ACNC recommends the
following:
• Go to the ACNC charity register to find the contact details of the charity that’s
calling you.
• Get in touch and ask that they stop calling and that they don’t pass on your
details to other charities or marketing firms.
• If the calls or other contacts keep coming, lodge a complaint with the Office of
the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).
I did ask one of the scam charity callers what their registered name was and ABN and they said “What’s an ABN.”
The telephone number comes up on my phone. Intertate numbers I don’t answer. If I am unsure, I answer the call, but I don’t say anything - usually they hang up straight away. Some I answer are charities and although I feel guilty for doing it - I hang up on them. I have had a few calls that are recorded scams - I just hang up. People are just so fed up with unwanted phone calls.
Like most that have made a comment, the most common is to not answer a call not on my contacts list. My message for voice mail says," you have been sent to my voice mail because you are not on my contacts list. If you do not leave a message your current number will be black listed and blocked."
The only problem with this is that the scam caller now has a know active phone number. And in most cases this is what they are doing, establishing real numbers.
I have setup different ring tones for my friends and family and that allows me to know to pickup. And I am also on the useless DNC service.
On my mobile, I use the Google Phone agent to answer calls from numbers that are not in my contacts list. I can see the text of the message that is being played to the caller, and most of the time, the ( scam/spam ) caller hangs up quickly. However, if they state their name and the purpose of their call, I can see this as text and decide whether or not to take the call.
At home, our VOIP phone is an old ISDN deskset with CND. If the displayed number is not one that I recognise or absent, I let our router’s answering machine take the call.
I often pick a spam called by either the delay in their pickup or background call centre noise. I immediately ask what they wish to purchase, I then add, this is a selling phone # not a buying #. Now what do you wish to order? Iff they try and continue I say goodbye pleasantly, because when I slammed the phone down in the past, next time the phone rang I would be aggressive to the wrong person!
An approach I have used in the past to answer unknown calls. Say you are a business.
I have in the past been gentle hands massage parlour, or gregr’s pizza, or even the cat jockey association.
If they want to speak to me, knowing my name, I ask them what the call is about, and if they want to hold whilst I see if gregr can come to the phone, or would they like to leave a message.
That is the end pretty much always. And a bit of fun.
l get up to 30 a week on my mobile, either interstate or mobile numbers…though l suspect they are mostly from overseas. lf l answer (rarely) there is either no one at the other end or a lag before the scammer speaks.l have probably hundreds of blocked callers now and use Reverse Australia for verification
l was in both of the big data breaches in recent years and do lots of online shopping, so l guess my number is on lots of lists…
Thanks syncretic - if you believe they’re legitimate telemarketers, who aren’t abiding by the register, you can complain to the ACMA via the DNC. But as you say, they may just be scammers anyway. We’ve put questions to the ACMA about what it’s doing to stop scam calls.
Thank you. There has been talk here previously about whether the failure is due to lack of effort or due to limitations of current technology. I don’t think I am the only one who would be very interested in the answer to that and also, if the answer is the tech, how difficult it would be to fix the problem.
True! But because scammers can now record people’s voices and use them to trick voice-recognition systems, you should probably say as little as possible (politely or otherwise) when picking up a call from a number you don’t recognise. Some AI systems can accurately imitate someone’s voice with as little as 3 seconds of recording …
This is a good reason not to string the scammer along, try to trick them, etc. [Edit:] Also a good reason not to use your own voice in a voice message prompt. If you have the option, give the answering system a generic-voice prompt.
I only have a landline. (Yes I know, I’m the original ancient dinosaur!! Probably the only person in the universe who doesn’t have a mobile.) Never been a ‘phone person’ per se, but I do get calls that are obviously from a call centre (Overseas) and are undoubtedly scams. I find that these calls are usually identifiable by the fact that they don’t answer straight away. In other words ‘they’ have put me on hold until I answer. That in itself angers me. If they want to talk to me they should answer as soon as I pick up the phone. I generally say “hello” twice (maybe three times if feeling generous!!) then hang up. That’s it. I have no intension of holding on whilst ‘they’ take me off hold!! I also have no compunction in doing that. Anyone else (family/friends) always speak as soon as I answer. It also begs the question, how do they get my phone number? I suspect that lists of phone numbers are sold to bidders. I don’t know if I am right of course, but if so, who is allowing this to happen? I can’t imagine scammers or similar just picking random numbers out of a ‘phone book’. However, what do I know???
I think the increase in the seemingly random numbers from legitimate businesses has originated from the prevalence of work-from-home practices these days. At least, that’s been my experience in many circumstances.
Cold callers (and many are not scammers) only want to talk to a human.
So when the phone is answered, they wait for signs of an answering service. Which are typically things like ‘the number you have called…’, or ‘sorry, I can’t take your call…’, etc. Then hang up.
Some set the answering message to something like ‘hello (pause) I can’t take your call…’ so they need to wait a bit longer.
My daughter was, not long back, working for a company whose policy was to periodically make follow up phone calls to people who had contacted them regarding their services. The policy was that the staff had to phone at a certain frequency until such time as the contact specifically requested no further contact, then they were removed from the call list. My daughter used to say that it was a relief to be able to stop hassling them, but she was not allowed to reveal this tip to people and her calls could have been reviewed by management. On the strength of that intel, if I receive a follow up call I’m now very specific that I want to be removed from the call list and this works well - and is potentially relieving the caller of a degree of stress!
